FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE Announcement

It is my great privilege and pleasure to announce the availability of
FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE. This release continues FreeBSD on the path of
advanced multiprocessor and application thread support and includes
many improved and widely-sought features:

Support for Physical Address Extensions enables Pentium Pro and
higher CPUs to access up to 64GB of RAM.

Experimental Name Service Switch infrastructure allows enterprises
to seamlessly integrate with LDAP and Active Directory services.

Enhanced "jail" management, allowing one server to provide many
different "virtual machines" with reduced administrator workload.

New device drivers include support for IBM/Adaptec ServeRAID
controllers, expanded support for USB 2.0 and USB Ethernet adapters,
and Promise Serial ATA controllers.

Experimental support for the amd64 platform allows FreeBSD to run
on single processor AMD Opteron systems.

Although stability is greatly improved and many bugs have been fixed,
FreeBSD 5.1 might not be suitable for all users. More conservative users
may prefer to continue using FreeBSD 4.X. Information on the various
trade-offs involved, as well as some notes on future plans for both
FreeBSD 4.X and 5.X, can be found in the Early Adopter's Guide, available
here:

This release is dedicated to the memory of Alan Eldridge. Alan was a
talented and dedicated member of the KDE On FreeBSD team and the FreeBSD
community, and his passing is mourned by all of us. For more information,
please see
http://freebsd.kde.org/memoriam/alane.php.

Availability

FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE supports the i386, pc98, alpha, sparc64, and
ia64 architectures and can be installed directly over the net using the
boot floppies or copied to a local NFS/FTP server. Distributions for
all architectures are available now.

Please continue to support the FreeBSD Project by purchasing media
from one of our supporting vendors. The following companies will be
offering FreeBSD 5.1 based products:

If you can't afford FreeBSD on media, are impatient, or just want to
use it for evangelism purposes, then by all means download the ISO
images. We can't promise that all the mirror sites will carry the
larger ISO images, but they will at least be available from: